“Computational Civil Engineering - "Intersections" International Journal

“Computational Civil Engineering 2005”, International Symposium 49The system was imagined from start as a knowledge base, considering that we hadto deal with a lot of information and many data formats. The generated output isstill in HTML (including frames, style-sheets and scripts), considering theprevalence and nearly compatibility of most browsers on various hardware andsoftware platforms, and the processing speed. Due to that reason, the best-suitedcommunication medium was and remains the increasingly accessible Internet.The knowledge server is in fact a database server (Postgres, on Linux of course)and the meta-knowledge was formulated using mainly JavaScript and cgi (commongateway interface – a facility through which the Apache server launches localapplications), exploiting most of the possibilities offered by HTML. Theinterrogation of the database goes through SQL, via PERL. The search is done byPostgres, the query being transmitted via psql (PostgreSQL) front-end. The searchresults are buffered and processed afterwards by a set of applications into a showygraphical arrangement. After a while, we started to use Apache ASP (Active ServerPages) which gave us the feasibility to separate the logic of the content from thelogic of the visualization. Although we are still not using XML, the inclusion ofCIFS (Common Internet File System) type referring and relational (ANSI SQL)ones offered us opening and scalability in the same time.From editorial point of view, we are still using ANSI text editors, but we areconsidering to step toward LATEX because, besides typographical preprocessing,it offers replication possibilities in DVI, PS and PDF formats, aside HTML.Figure 6. User interface of the “AIC info” dictionary.